1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a card-shaped processing apparatus used by mounted in a personal computer or the like, more particularly relates to a video card capable of suitably carrying out an input/output, encoding/decoding, and communication processing of video data, and to a video card communication apparatus suitable for carrying out a video conference and constituted using the video card.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advances made in image processing technology and communication technology are leading to the realization of television telephone systems and television conference systems.
On the other hand, advances in semiconductor technology have resulted in rapid progress in the improvement of performance and reduction of size of data processing apparatuses. High performance personal computers having performances comparable to a conventional mainframe computers and smaller notebook type personal computers (notebook type PCs) etc. have been developed and have spread widely. Further, even the peripherals connected to such personal computers are being made in the form of cards. Cards are in particular now becoming one of the main means for adding functions to notebook type PCs. Further, these cards have been improved in function from memory cards containing a memory and just functioning as recording medium to IC cards having specific processing functions.
Almost all of the above conventional television telephone systems and television conference systems have been large in size of hardware and high in price and therefore have not been systems which can be easily utilized by the general public. In order to realize such functions, further, real time processing of pictures, particularly moving pictures, becomes necessary, but this kind of processing involves an enormous amount of data and demands high speeds. For this reason, even though progress has been made in improvement of performance, the load thereof is not small by any means even in the computer devices as mentioned above. Usually, such functions are realized by dedicated image memories, dedicated processors, or dedicated processing apparatuses having DSPs or the like.